THE
periodic international conferences on the threat of global warming are
pure burlesque shows; full of hot words, dire predictions, elaborate
scientific presentations, ending up in disagreements...

Meanwhile, global
warming goes on, and nothing can prevent large chunks of the earth’s
surface — coastal Bangladesh, for instance from being swept away in
the foreseeable future.

In fact, it might be
already too late to save some of the threatened areas. All we can do
is to slow down the pace a bit, but that will need a determined effort
on the part of all the major nations of the world: They will have to
make drastic reductions in the use of fossil fuels and, at the same
time, initiate programmes for massive reforestation of waste lands.

And, of course, save
such forests as are already there. In brief, use your car only when
you must, and go and plant trees. A peculiar aspect of these
conferences on global warming is that the normal ranking order of the
nations of the world no longer holds good. Here, by and large,
the affluent nations are the guilty parties and ‘developing’
countries the finger-pointers. Here Uncle Sam does not play his
customary role of headmaster, but finds himself in the cage as the
principal accused: the nation most responsible for the alarming
acceleration in the pace of global warming.

For their part, the Americans,
while they’re in complete agreement with the view that something
must be done to temper the pace of global warming, absolutely refuse
to so much as consider lowering their quite horrendously excessive use
of fossil fuels. Instead, they say, they will buy up rich rain-forests
in the poorer countries — such as Bolivia — and make sure that
they are not destroyed, and that should be accepted as contribution to
the aims of the conference.

In other words: I’ll
burn up as much petrol as I damn-well want to; but I’m perfectly
willing to make amends for my overindulgence by saving a forest in
Bolivia — which will ensure that particular source of breathable air
is preserved for posterity.

The logic is that of
Alice in Wonderland, but somehow close to orthodox Hindu ideas of punya
and paap: spiritual merit or demerit, which you earn by good
deeds or bad deeds. The pluses cancel out the minuses: a black-money
deal washed away by feeding a cow for a year — that sort of thing.
Why should we feel guilty about using too much fossil fuel so long as
we make amends by saving those rich forests in Bolivia?

Oh, well. These are
no more than debating points; a smoke-screen of words, a part of the
game plan for nations with guilty consciences. But one thing that
everyone seemed to be agreed about was that the only way of slowing
down the pace of global warming was to create new forests.

Create forests? But
how? Have we not, in India, sought to do just that, and failed —
failed miserably? Every year during the rains, a day is set aside for Vanamahotsava:
a festival of forests. We see a positive orgy of tree-plantings.
Ministers in all sizes and shapes in the big cities, and armies of
bureaucrats in the moffusil, are seen holding watering cans over
knee-high saplings while grinning wildly for the photo ops. If only a
half of those baby trees had reached maturity, India would have been
smothered in jungles.

It didn’t work —
but then no one expected it to. Vanamahotsavas were, after all,
festivals — days for celebrating our veneration of trees — not to
create new vanas — dammit. We’re a country rich in
inherited forests, aren’t we?

Alas, not: We were
rich in forests once; but no longer. Ever since Independence, we have
gone on savaging our forests with such fury that today, only truncated
and moth-eaten bits still remain.

One such inherited
forest area was that of the Western Ghats; recognised as a veritable
treasurehouse of gifts from nature, packed with a variety of wild
life, animals, birds, trees: 3500 different species of wild flowers
— a staggering 27 per cent of the national total — were to be
found in the Western Ghats.

All these years, the
Western Ghats were all but abandoned to the uncontrolled demands of
commerce: enormous dams were put up, populations shifted at will,
rainforest hacked away for timber and their habitat blasted out for
iron and manganese ores, their river system made to serve as drains
for the effluents of industry, their very skies filled with foul
smells and soot.

But only lately,
those responsible for conserving the nation’s natural resources and
beauty spots, seem to have woken up to the fact that, unless the rot
was stopped, the Western Ghats, too, might become a lost cause — a
gone case, to be made a subject for post-mortem investigation along
with similar failures: lost Ganga, lost Yamuna, lost terais,
wetlands, tigers, vultures.

The Ministry of
Environment and Forests has published a policy statement entitled ‘Guidelines
for Biosphere Reserves’, and in it singled out the Western Ghats as
a hotspotbecause they possess an "exceptional
concentration of species and high levels of endemism...(which
face)...an exceptional threat of destruction. So, three cheers for the
new mantra: ‘Biosphere Reserves’. Whatever is still left of the
Western Ghats will be saved from further despoilation.

But will it? —
because the three states which, between them share the Western Ghats,
have their own agendas for their future, and these have little or
nothing in common with Central Government’s plans to create
biosphere reserves.

The alarming
dissimilarities of viewpoints between the F & E Ministry on the
one hand and the state governments on the other, was highlighted by
the case of a Coke Oven plant that the Karnataka Government had ‘cleared’
in 1996, and, as it were, pushed forward once again in 1998 — just
when the Centre was thinking out ways to forbid the setting up of
pollutive industries in what were considered hotspots.

Now a Coke Oven plant
is classed as a ‘Dinosaur’ industry, meaning that it is an
outdated method of producing gas and electricity, and because of its
devastating effects on the surrounding landscape, it is ranked high
among what are called The Dirty Dozen of pollutive enterprises. And
this particular plant was to be a truly gigantic version, spread over
830 acres, burning up three million tonne of coal every year, sopping
up all water from a minor river plus 40 million litres a day from
another, spewing out ashes and soot in vast quantities, and tar and
chemical wastes into the river system.

And against all norms
of locating such an industry as far away from prime forests and wild
life sanctuaries, this one was to be put up in the middle of a rich
forest, and on the edge of a lake as well as a wild life sanctuary.

The howls of protests
from the several local environment groups were dismissed as being
anti-progressive. Then, after four years, the promoters themselves,
for purely commercial reasons, backed out of the venture. If they had
gone on with their plans as scheduled, the biosphere reserve formula
would have come too late to have saved this particular section of the
ghats.

"Blame the
environmentalists," was the official reaction. They have
torpedoed our best-laid plans for developing this neglected district
and to create hundreds of jobs for the unemployed!